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August 17, 2013

Big Data Security: 5 Questions You Need to Ask
"Big data provides an important opportunity to deliver value from information, but an enterprise will be more successful in the long run if policies and frameworks, such as Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT), are put into place first." To guide CIOs, ISACA identified 16 important questions enterprises must answer to assess their environments. In particular, these key five questions, if left unanswered, could expose their companies to greater risk and damage:

Understanding Predictive Analytics: A Spotlight Q&A with Eric Siegel
You need to predict significantly better than guessing, and that’s what makes it valuable. So if there’s a needle in the haystack issue for law enforcement, for fraud, for customers who are going to be extremely valuable or for a rare disease in healthcare, what you’re doing is you’re making the haystack much smaller. Business is a numbers game, and you play that numbers game much more effectively by tipping the odds in your favor by saying, “This customer is three times more likely than average to be an extremely poor credit risk.”

3 Key Skills Of Successful Data Scientists
According to Dr. Andrew Jennings, chief analytics officer at FICO and head of FICO Labs, three of these characteristics are most important, and every organization in the market for a data scientist should know what they are. In a phone interview with InformationWeek, Jennings revealed this holy trio.

12 hard truths about cloud computing
This isn't to say there's no truth to what the cloud companies proclaim, but there are plenty of tricky details that aren't immediately obvious. At their core, the machines aren't miracle workers, just the next generation of what we've been using for years. The improvements are incremental, not revolutionary. If we dial back our hopes and approach the machines with moderated expectations, they're quite nice. To keep our expectations in check, here is a list of what to really expect from the cloud.

New Tweets per second record, and how!
We took Gizzard, our framework to create sharded and fault-tolerant distributed databases, and applied it to tweets. We created T-Bird. In this case, Gizzard was fronting a series of MySQL databases –– every time a tweet comes into the system, Gizzard hashes it, and then chooses an appropriate database. Of course, this means we lose the ability to rely on MySQL for unique ID generation. Snowflake was born to solve that problem.

Agents for Agility: The Just-In-Time Enterprise Has Arrived
Hear Analysts Krish Krishnan of Sixth Sense, and Dr. Robin Bloor of The Bloor Group, as they outline their competing visions for the architecture of a real-time enterprise in this episode of Hot Technologies. He'll discuss how EnterpriseWeb leverages the best ideas of service orientation, combined with intelligent agents that act as virtual hubs for the sharing of data, analytics, and mission-critical business processes

Cybercriminals add exploit for patched Java flaw to their arsenal
Two days after its release, the CVE-2013-2465 exploit was already integrated into so-called exploit kits, attack tools that infect computers with malware by exploiting vulnerabilities in outdated software when users visit compromised websites. An independent malware researcher who uses the online alias Kafeine found a live installation of the Styx exploit kit, previously known as Kein, that is using the exploit.

CIO 2.x: Champion for SaaS, advocate for businessSo what does CIO 2.x look like? A few patterns have surfaced from the recent SaaS roundtable discussions I hosted with IBM client executives. One observation is that IT leadership is becoming a true advocate for business transformation versus an inhibitor to change. IT-driven initiatives such as “Cloud First” are a great example of what this type of bold transformation looks like.

Big Data Analytics Will Never Fully Replace Crative ThoughtAs technology improves, the power of big data analytics should only grow - but according to skeptics, this development may have its limits. By focusing on data quality and analytical philosophies, business leaders can certainly improve, but only to a certain point. Data can be tremendously useful, but it will never fully replace human thought. The data craze is reaching its apex in 2013, but there are two major areas where people run the risk of getting carried away.

Quote for the day:"A goal should scare you a little, and excite you a lot." -- Dr. Joe Vitale